Pokémon GO and AR

Pokémon GO Craze

Talking about Pokémon GO and Augmented Reality with Jake Yang

As most people know Pokémon GO has become a viral sensation worldwide and South Korea is not an exception. Pokémon GO, hitting 30 million downloads already, is a location-based AR (Augmented Reality) game developed and published by Niantic for iOS and Android devices. Pocket monsters are hidden around our real world and people need to go look for them.

South Korea is not supposed to support this game but currently the game is inadvertently available in some parts of South Korea – Sokcho (according to a report by Associated Press, South Korean officials have claimed that an arbitrary glitch in the gaming system mistakenly classified Sokcho as being in the US). Since word got out, the town has been bombarded with visitors looking to play the game. As more people are getting into Pokémon GO, there also are unexpected side effects like injuries, robbery even though the game app itself includes a warning in the loading screen asking players to pay attention to their surroundings. Be that as it may, it is an undeniable fact that Pokémon GO is perhaps the first real success story of the use of AR technology.

[South Korea map for Pokémon GO]

I’d like to say the success of this game is a combination of an existing technology AR and a Japanese popular character Pokémon or the victory of Google that developed AlphaGo and made it the latest sensation earlier.

This game company Niantic spun out of Google in 2015 and Google invested about 30 billion dollars in this spinoff. Robust social networking feature that requires collaboration to complete missions and Crowdsourcing for maps could also be success factors, too.

[Pokémon GO app screen]

Is AR a challenging technology?

I think making games and events more sophisticated and quality based on the location is the trickiest part in utilizing AR technology and AR itself is not a difficult thing.

It has been reported quite a lot that many of AR-based apps are unstable and easily stop working and Pokémon GO was also one of them.

Before this Pokémon GO craze, there were some AR-based apps in Korea as well – CatchCatch by KT Olleh, ‘Chevrolet Catch’ and ‘Lotte Lucky Bird’ powered by I-ON Communications. I-ON even provided a service that is specialized to a specific event utilizing the AR technology and the service was commercialized in 2011.

Was AR the only key to success?

Pokémon GO fever is not just because of AR. This phenomenon is mostly thanks to the power of Japan that created the outstanding character called ‘Pokémon’. AR is just a technology playing an auxiliary role to support the contents.

Leveraging a social network feature, crowdsourcing and US, a brilliant issue maker with Google, Pokémon GO has swept across the globe. 

I was indeed overwhelmed by the US’s issue making, its worldwide scale and the great power of Japanese character business.

There are many different characters in Japan other than Pokémon and Japan is capable of creating viable options leveraging those characters. It remains to be seen if they make various rip-offs of Pokémon GO.

South Korea also has numerous characters such as Pororo, Turning Mecard, Taoist Meoteol but I’m afraid Korea is not as powerful as Japanese characters and US brands that can attract a lot of attention.

AR is just a kind of technology, no more or less than that. It’d be more exciting to make quality games and services based on a thorough study of the key factor to Pokémon GO success rather than to just provide things alike.

I’d like to end this column by hoping that many attempts to go for AR-based apps and services now pay off now that everyone knows the success story of Pokémon GO. And I-ON has varied AR-based apps and any comment or inquiry on these would be more than welcome.